Posts Tagged ‘tomato sauce’

Last Thursday, the organizer of the Ted X Cambridge conference invited our Internet of Tomatoesteam to feature the prototype technology developed by our lead sponsor, Analog Devices, and become the centerpiece of the event’s Innovation Lab (see two preceding entries in this blog for a description of the project). We turned out to be mobbed all evening, with some of the geeky Cambridge crowd heading straight for the prototype devices and farm data displays, while foodies gravitated toward the new local tomato sauce offered by Heritage Food Truck Catering, or wanted to palm the beautiful heirloom tomatoes displayed by Wards Berry Farm in Sharon. Many were curious to find out what this strange mix of science, agriculture and food was about. And of course, this was the idea …

As the evening progressed, and since tomatoes were in the air, I started thinking of the development of Internet of Things technologies as the equivalent of a ratatouille. Throw some tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, zucchini, squash, onions, and garlic into a large pan with a bit of olive oil, let it simmer for hours, try it, add some herbes de Provence, try again, throw in more stuff, invite a few friends, get them to tell you what’s missing, have them bring those ingredients from their garden, and let them recruit other people excited about coming and sharing in your gastronomical production.

Technology development, like ratatouille, is no longer about creating a recipe in the lab and following a step-by-step process: it’s a series of culinary jam sessions happening over time, as the technology team moves from farm to farm and kitchen to kitchen, and the team fuses new components in reaction to what it learns at each event. Each public session is a performance, and each session acts as a forcing function for the technology development. Marketing people force the technologists to deliver at fixed intervals of time rather than meander as butterflies in the orchard of knowledge, which would be their natural tendency.

In the new co-creation approach, scientists still need to be technically irreproachable and (minimally) rehearsed, but a lot of the technology development happens in real time, with the marketing staff asking the technologists more and more anxiously, as the event gets closer, “whether the demo will be ready in time”. The answer is always yes, and miracles nearly always occur. At TedX, some of the actual fusion occurred on stage in the hour that preceded the beginning of the show (“does this conference offer Internet access?”). The best integrated narrative across farmers, chefs and scientists was developed on the fly, led by questions from visitors.

Watching my two brilliant Analog Devices technology colleagues in action at TedX, I found myself reflecting on how much personal transformation will be required of traditional scientists to move from developer of a traditional cook book recipe to becoming an improv’ artist able to engage others in preparing a large-scale meal where an entire community makes a contribution. This is what an Internet of Things project is like. It involves building a community of interested people adopting a common platform and set of data to change an entire ecosystem. Yes, the same engineering skills and ability to solve complex technical problems are still needed, but IoT scientists also have to develop an interpersonal ability to engage lay people, make the science accessible to them and get them on the collective road to discovery. In a world where scientists are called extroverts when they look at the other scientist’s shoe instead of their own, this represents a considerable challenge…

Being in Cambridge for TedX also reminded me of ratatouille because this is where Julia Child was from and her ratatouille recipe is my favorite (a statement which will undoubtedly cause my French country fellowmen to disown me). The best ratatouilles are inextricably linked to the personalities of their creators, and her infectious enthusiasm still brings a smile to my face whenever I think of her. The same is true for IoT technologies. Most of the fun for the public at TedX was in engaging live with the technologists describing the agony of sending data to the cloud when most farms have no Internet, the farmers describing the anxiety of the potential arrival of late blight, or the chefs waxing eloquent on the challenge of removing water from the pasta sauce when you use New England heirlooms instead of plum tomatoes.

Products are no longer the mysterious output of behind-the-curtain development processes. The technology kitchen is now wide open to the public, and customers want to acknowledge the artistry of scientists, just like they recognize the food artistry of great chefs. In the future, companies will have to become talent agents for their best scientists and market their personalities as an integral part of their value proposition on an equal footing with their products (the scientists and their oeuvre). And the best of them will have to learn to rock on the stages of technology festivals.

Sadly, the tomato season is now over, and I will have to either fly to the Southern Hemisphere or wait until next summer for ratatouille. Or better yet, I’ll talk my scientist colleagues into launching an Internet of Potatoes project to continue jamming together this fall and winter. I’m having too much fun.

It’s not easy being a Frenchman that has neither a good palate, nor any culinary ability of any kind. Having had my deficiencies exposed on numerous social occasions, I did the only reasonable thing under the circumstances: I started a food business (with the help of some of my friends). The enterprise is called Heritage Truck Catering. Heritage is a food truck we use to test on the streets of Boston the most recent culinary creations of our chef David Stein (“Chef David”), and this leads to the creation of food products that utilize local farm products.

On Saturday, October 3, at the Let’s Talk about Foodevent on Boston’s Copley Place, we unveiled our first product: a tomato sauce made from local New England tomatoes. Jim Ward, from Ward’s Berry Farm, contributed the tomatoes: a mix of his world-class heirloom, field and plum tomatoes. Chef David originated the concept of a local tomato sauce (his specialty is sauces and soups), and the actual development was led by Edith Murnane, former Head of Food Initiatives for the City of Boston, who led the project across its culinary, production and marketing aspects, with Adam Frawley taking the lead for production and quality at the Commonwealth Kitchen in Dorchester, with the support of a talented prep crew.

Simply put, we want to transform tomato agriculture and food consumption in New England, by progressively displacing the imported tomato sauce made with “bad tomatoes” from places without water (California), without soil (Florida) or places with dubious ethical and environmental practices (you know who you are). We believe these imports will gradually be replaced by an indigenous sauce made with “good tomatoes” that are locally grown, sustainable from an environmental and social standpoint, and offer a unique match with the soil of New England, what my country fellowmen call “terroir”. Because the best farmers in New England grow heirloom tomatoes, heirlooms constitute the distinctive feature of our tomato sauce. We were honored to receive positive feedback on the freshness of our product from a large number of visitors who came to our tent at Let’s Talk about Food, including a couple of nice endorsements from Boston celebrity chefs. A few homeless people stole some of our tomatoes, which we took to be a further form of approval.

Perhaps less gastronomically apparent lies a secret sauce behind our new tomato product: science. More specifically, a team of two Analog Devices scientists (Rob O’Reilly and JP O’Connor) are working with us in developing technologies that analytically track tomatoes from their growth at the farm, their transportation across the distribution chain and retailing, and their processing and eventual consumption. This project, called the Internet of Tomatoes, was also featured at Let’s Talk about Food and attracted great attention. We showed how sensors can be used to monitor the growth of the tomato plant at the farm to optimize irrigation or pest control (this is the cute little red birdhouse on the right of the picture). The data is aggregated locally through a sensor hub (appropriately called Fenway, even the technology is local!), then sent to the cloud, and finally analyzed through proprietary software to suggest new farming methods (“algorithms” in the jargon). In the Internet of Tomatoes approach, farmers control their own data and work together to create new insights as a community, without any risk of seeing large agricultural companies take control of that data to advance their agenda.

At the consumption stage, we are now in a position to analyze the contribution made by each individual tomato to the taste and texture of our tomato sauce, with the help of Analog Devices’ instrumentation and analytical ability. Heirlooms, in particular, offer a particularly wide range of sweetness, acidity, salt, or water content, which requires careful weighing of the dosage of each tomato in the final mix. While many heirloom buyers simply enjoy the idea of eating local heirloom tomatoes irrespective of their characteristics, we fingerprint our various tomatoes and combine them in each batch to get to the desired taste (yes, our chefs are a bit geeky!). We do this today with a mix of destructive techniques (i.e., we extract a liquid from the tomato and analyze it) and non-invasive optical technologies (view this as shining a light on the tomato at various frequencies and getting its full analytical profile from the way the tomato reacts to that light). For Star Trek fans among you, the idea is to eventually develop a Tricorder device that will allows consumers in the produce aisle at Whole Foods to use the device to decide whether to buy the produce or not.

All this, of course, has allowed to re- insert myself into the gastronomical discussion in spite of my kitchen limitations. I may not have the palate or the tour-de-main, but with the help of my Analog Devices colleagues, I am now at the culinary table, liberally sharing advice on the need to let the tomato ripen for a couple more days, or reduce the plum puree by another 10%. This has restored my French culinary credibility, and for that, there is no price.

Who I Am

I am a consultant and teacher who logs hundreds of thousands of air miles each year to share the principles of co-creation worldwide. As the President and Co-founder of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership (ECC Partnership), I work with a roster of global companies to implement co-creative, transformational programs, and processes. The April 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review features an article that I co-authored with Douglas Billings, "Community-Powered Problem Solving" illustrating how a brick and mortar business co-created solutions with their partners and changed the rules of the game. Earlier I co-authored (with Professor Venkat Ramaswamy) the book "The Power of Co-Creation: Build It with Them to Boost Growth, Productivity, and Profits" (Simon & Schuster Free Press, October 2010) and the Harvard Business Review article "Building the Co-Creative Enterprise" (October 2010).

WHY I BLOG

Co-creation is about connecting people’s brains. There is a method, a framework that can be taught conceptually and tools that can be implemented inside organizations. But at the heart of it is a personal transformation of people who suddenly see the world through a different lens. Consultants cannot tell those stories because of confidentiality. Academics are too removed from field work to have access to them. As if living at the intersection of these two worlds did not make me schizophrenic enough, I find myself of late developing a third, more humanistic streak: an urge to talk about the profoundly human aspect of co-creation. The stories I share in this blog are those of real people who have touched me in the somewhat random peregrinations of my global consulting and teaching career. Each of them embodies, in one form or other, the co-creation effect.